<Begin Segment 5>

MN: You were sharing another story with me about, there was a railroad track behind the old union church? And what did the railroads bring in?

JK: Oh, yes. The Times was in a different building that time. But they needed newsprint, so where else made newsprint? Canada. So the Times always had a railroad car full of newsprint, and newsprint would be behind Union Church. So we had a field day after it rained, and went to that... the trucks would come in full of mud, they would load the newsprint on the trucks and try to get out. Well, the mud would prevent the trucks from moving out of the mud, and we would just sit there and laugh at the truck drivers because they had a problem. But it was all in fun. But thanks to the L.A. Times, we learned our English and all.

MN: The bad English. Were the truck drivers pretty angry at you boys?

JK: Well, they were angry because we were laughing at them, but the Times always that that newspaper picked up behind the church. And what was good about that railroad was because it didn't come during the day. It came after midnight because we never heard the train because we were asleep. So we had our pennies, we had dimes flattened out, there's pennies on the tracks, next door we have lots of flat pennies. And because the trains came at night, and sometimes they took the empties away, we had a yard to play on. Hide and Seek, Kick the Can, and baseball and things like that. So we had our gang, hiding.

MN: You skated a lot too, right, when you were a kid?

JK: Yes. The stores, we had a warehouse, stores on First and Central, First and Alameda, and mail order skates, roller skates. Waited a few days for regular skate, and we would roll around the block, racing. And what made roller skates fun was because after the roller skates handle wore out, we opened the skates, nailed them to two by fours, and made coasters, scooters. Now we had scooters like the modern scooters, and we prided ourselves that we started the skateboard.

MN: Very innovative.

JK: Yes. And it was noisy, so the shopowners on first and San Pedro, they hated us to come because it's so noisy.

MN: Now, you were living at 155 North Central, and then your family moved in 1927 closer to where Fukui Mortuary is now, right?

JK: Yes.

MN: So, did your family become very close with the Fukui family?

JK: Well, the kids, Shoichi's grandfather, was the one that started. He was a vet of World War I, AAF. And he was from Hawaii, and I guess he started that. And Shoichi's family grew up with my sisters. They were unafraid of the corpse kept in the building. So my sisters were friends of Shoichi's sister and made themselves at home.

MN: Did you boys go in there and fool around?

JK: Yeah, we did. We saw dead bodies.

MN: Weren't you scared?

JK: Well, we were, the boys were kind of afraid, yeah. We're listening to all the stories about dead body, that soul going up to heaven.

MN: You boys snuck into Nishi Hongwanji, too.

JK: Yeah, because those days, they used to keep the bodies in the church. You used to see the body through the open windows. So the open... well, I guess we weren't cowards after all. We looked at the bodies.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.